Christopher Williams’s Retrospective Arrives at MoMA

Conceptual art giant Christopher Williams’s first retrospective ever travels to New York City, opening this Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. The artist’s prolific 35-year career and complicated relationship with photography—his preferred medium—is explored in-depth in “The Production Line of Happiness,” which will run through the beginning of November.

There are pieces from his early years, including little-seen Super 8 film shorts as well as his more well-known late-eighties project Angola to Vietnam*, a portfolio of 27 glass flowers from countries around the world that were plagued by political unrest and violence in the 1980s. The artist’s disdain for capitalism is particularly palpable in his series “For Example: Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful),” which features pictures of consumerist culture in its less overt manifestations—a photo of a beach in communist Cuba that is maintained only for the foreign tourists who visit, for instance. And there is a generous selection of his more recent work, including his images that resemble advertisements—smiling models, Ritter chocolate bars—but which contain at least one conspicuous imperfection.

Visitors might be surprised (and confused) to find that the show doesn’t include exhibition labels. Instead, museumgoers will be given a numbered map and key that provides the very long titles of each of his works, some more revealing than what’s hanging on the walls.